#Sendak (vld) | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

confusedblakex · 9 days ago

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A burning hatred (Pt1)

Pairing: Takashi 'Shiro' Shirogane X (Male) Reader

Summary: Where most Galra find entertainment, you find nothing but disgust. Shiro arrived at Zarkon's arena one fateful day, perhaps he was just what you were looking for.

Wordcount: 1722

Warnings: TW - Very descriptive violence, Imprisonment, Death, Blood, Asphyxiation, Sacrifice

Requested by: I refuse to let this fandom die

Notes: Star Trek and Voltron feel quite similar now that I think about it; No romance yet; Galra commander reader

Last edited: 16th November 2024

There had been a new intake of prisoners.

As was expected of you, you took your seat with the rest of the Galra commanders. The sea of cheering people was overwhelming. Myzax was in the ring again.

The arena was not entertaining to you. There was no fight here, this was a public execution. The gladiators were Salixan wolves playing with their prey before going in for the kill. Disgusting.

Prisoners deemed fit enough to fight were bought here. Luckily, most of the new intake had arrived injured and were declared unfit to fight. You thanked the universe for even the smallest of mercies.

Behind the gates, there were a dozen different creatures of varying species. An Earthling stood at the front of the line, quivering and dressed in an oversized prisoner’s tunic. He was short, scrawny and - by the fear in his eyes - didn’t have the strength to fight.

Perhaps, you thought, by some miracle, this boy would somehow manage to scrape by with only a severe injury. Perhaps you could leave, tell your fellow commanders that the prisoners are too weak for a proper fight and it bores you. That way, you might not have to watch.

A sentry walked down to the gate, rifle pointed squarely at the Earthling boy. In a flash, another Earthling appeared, pulling the rifle from the sentry’s grip and pushing the droid into the wall. It sparked and slumped over, showing the Earthling’s strength.

You watched intently as the audience roared.

The man was tall, broad-shouldered and muscular enough to put up a fight. His back was turned to you, but his body language showed no hint of fear. With the bayonet he held, the man turned to his fellow prisoners and took a slash at the weak one.

Over the cheering and yelling of the area’s audience, you couldn’t hear a word of what he yelled, but another sentry arrived and forcefully took the Earthling by his arm. You averted your eyes momentarily as the gates opened.

There was clearly some relation between the Earthlings, and in a bid to save the boy who couldn’t fight, this man had put himself first in line to face Myzax. It was smart, you had to admit, but watching someone sacrifice themself somehow made it worse than just watching them die.

Myzax roared and the spectators cheered as the Earthling was handed a Galran sword. And the fight began at once.

The large gladiator let the energy orb on the end of his bat charge for a moment before hurling the orb at the Earthling. Barely dodging, the man tripped himself over to get away. Unrelenting, Myzax threw the orb again. In a desperate attempt to dodge, the man rolled over and jumped at the Galra, landing a shallow cut on his arm before retreating from the orb once more.

And the game of Salixan wolf and rodent began.

For a while, the Earthling only dodged, ducking behind the pillars of the arena, seemingly formulating something. The energy orb was thrown again, this time the man used his sword's flat edge as a shield. He was knocked back significantly, but didn’t fall. Once again, Myzax threw the orb. The man knelt down, raising his sword to cover himself as the impact pushed him into the dusty floor.

Myzax raised his bat, the orb flying back to recharge. As the mechanical wiring hummed deep under the loud yelling of the Galran audience, the Earthling lunged to take a swing at the gladiator. A large gash cut across the gladiator’s shoulder, slicing through his neck.

The Galra wobbled on his feet, purple-red blood spilling down his chest. Weakly, Myzax lifted the orb on its plinth and hurled it at where the Earthling had drawn back to.

Panicked upon seeing the energy orb once more, the man rolled away from the incoming projectile. One hit on the ground. The gladiator swung his arm around as much as his injury would allow, the orb flying back over to the Earthling. Narrowly dodged again, he was taking advantage of Myzax’s weakened state. Twice now, and the orb drew back for the final attack. The man raised his sword again.

A third hit. The metal sword shattered, and the orb flew back to Myzax. Before the hum of the recharge could even start, the Earthling jumped and plunged the blunted half of the snapped sword through the gladiator’s chest. With a loud roar, Myzax fell to his knees. The undefeated, killed by an Earthling - of all species.

The spectators cheered more, louder still, and the man standing in the centre of the arena let out a scream of victory. He played to the crowd well.

Without thinking for a moment more, you slammed your fist into the arm of your chair and rose.

“Who’s is he?” your voice sounded over everyone, quiet falling throughout the room.

You stood in silence for a moment, looking across the Galra commanders.

“The Earthling would be mine,” a commander a few rows down announced as he stood.

“I want him. Name your price,” you stated, voice loud and confident. If you could get a hold of this Earthling, you might just be able to do a little good in this universe.

“4000 GAC,” the commander you didn’t know requested.

“Done.” you said, definitively.

“I offer 5000!” A voice called a few chairs to your right. Commander Sendak.

“This is no auction,” you chastised.

“I will not stand down!” he called, turning towards to owner of the Earthling.

“Sendak! You and I both know that I can outbid you.” you reminded him, keeping yout voice level and confident. As a decorated warrior from a long line of commanders, you had the power of currency on your side.

Sandak huffed and stopped for a moment before turning to look up at the Emperor.

“Permission to exercise my Galra rights, my Emperor?” he asked, bowing slightly.

You lowered your head in respect and looked back up to see Zarkon nod.

“I challenge you to a Sar duel for ownership of the Earthling fighter!” Sendak called, as soon as he received Zarkon’s permission.

“Come now, we are in an arena, and the people want a fight,” he taunted as he saw the torn expression on your face.

“I accept.” you said, determined. You may not want to fight, but you couldn’t risk leaving the Earthling with anyone else.

“What are your terms?” the unknown commander asked.

“If I win, I get the Earthling and Commander Sendak shall be sent off to the Javeeno Star System with no crew, for reconnaissance and surveillance.” you called, the crowd surrounding you applauded your decision, “And you?”

“If I win, I take the prisoner. And you, Commander (l/n), will be stripped of rank and sent to Noxxal to die a dishonourable death!” Sendak shouted.

The room went quiet with murmurs. Noxxal… you would die from starvation, if the cold didn’t get to you first. A dishonourable death, to not be killed in battle.

“And the loser pays 5000 GAC for the victor?” you clarified, looking to the Earthling’s finder.

“Agreed.”

“The terms are set. Let us begin,” you announced. Both Sendak and you descended to the arena floor.

“Hold the Earthling!” Sendak commanded, and two sentries stood at either side of the man, leading him back out through the arena gate.

Sendak took gauntlets, his weapon of choice. They were great meatal things that pulsed with Galran energy. This was the only advantage he had over you.

You chose to take a battleaxe. Versatile and deadly, you knew them well.

“Vrepit sa.”

“Vrepit sa…”

You immediately took first swing at Sendak, purposefully overshooting and missing him. The swing went past his ear, and took him off guard, leading him to turn in an attempt to throw a punch at your gut. In his moment of pivot, you took the haft of your axe directly to his face.

He stumbled backwards, nose dripping with blood. You swung again, leaving him no time for recovery, a jab at his chest that he narrowly avoided. And again, quickly, but he had recovered in time and grabbed your axe’s blade with his gauntlets.

He threw your axe to his side, and you barely kept your grip. This was how the fight continued. You would hit a blow, he would recover, and Sendak would send you backwards.

A slash to his knee, a hit to your stomach, a jab that very nearly took his ear off, a punch square to your nose - revenge for that first hit you got on him. Finally, after 10 minutes of equally balanced fighting, you decided to play dirty. This Earthling was worth the life of the idiot known as Sendak.

You backed up slowly, reaching a pillar, then swung and lodged your axe at an angle in the stone. You threw yourself at Sendak, going for the gauntlets. You sent a jab at his neck, causing him to lose his breath enough for you to kick with all your might at his left gauntlet. With a crackle of power, the purple glow dissipated and the glove stopped responding.

Sendak growled at you and shook the gauntlet off his hand, immediately lunging at you. You dodged, but not enough, as he grabbed you by the arm, spun you, and hooked his arm around your neck. Gauntlet to your throat, he held you there, spluttering for a breath that wouldn’t come. Your body burned with adrenaline and you stomped at his feet under you, kicking back at his shins.

Sendak walked backwards slowly to avoid your kicks until his back was pressed up against a pillar. Perfect.

With the last of your oxygenated strength, you reached out for the axe that was lodged in the stone. In one quick pull, the axe swung at Sendak’s arm and your face. At the last moment, you shifted your head to the side, lodging the axe entirely through Sendak’s arm.

His grip fell limp, and you took a great inhale of air.

The crowd roared in cheer, and Sendak made a barely audible noise - like a whimper - that only you could hear.

“Consider that payment for challenging me.” You spoke lowly in his ear, before turning to leave.

Where was that Earthling?

#x reader #x male reader #shiro x reader #takashi shirogane x reader #voltron x reader #vld x reader #galra reader #shiro #takashi shirogane #vld shiro #matt holt #sendak #fight scene #voltron legendary defender #voltron #vld

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kismetconstellations · 2 months ago

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@sockdooe I first encountered this supposed explanation in the comments section of a fanfiction, so it is to be taken with a grain of salt, but I read that Shiro's design was primarily based on what the showrunners thought "looked cool". This includes the prosthetic grafted onto his person by his captors, the scar across his face, and the shock of white fringe in his otherwise naturally dark hair. And, I won't lie, his design serves its purpose. Shiro immediately draws the eye, and not just because of his usual placement front and center in the standard team line up.

It's reasonable for the sort of space soldier, G.I. Joe type of character the staff intended Shiro to be to have these sorts of physical characteristics.

It's also completely reasonable in a Sci-Fi/Action show for a villain as menacing and ruthless as Sendak to have a similarly distinct, eye-catching design. Such features as a sinister, gleaming, red bionic eye, and massive prosthetic arm powered by a core of glowing, magical electric energy pulsing in a line from shoulder to forearm stand out, are easily memorable, and make him instantly recognizable as a really Bad Guy.

The idea of Shiro being a sort of "light, heroic mirror" to Sendak, which the show introduced and continued to attempt to enforce all the way up to Sendak's death, sits incredibly uneasily with me, however. As I've made explicit several times, before.

Content Warning for discussion of sexual assault/rape.

We're shown the recurrent imagery of Sendak looming over and behind an incapacitated Shiro.

Shiro's instinctive response to seeing Sendak heading toward him is to back away out of fear before steeling himself and resolving to fight, if only to protect the Castle and an unconscious Lance.

The very first thing that Shiro says to Sendak is, "You're not getting in", to which Sendak replies, "Yes. I am".

Coran suggests that the Galra might keep him and Hunk as, "some sort of creepy pet to play with how they please", in an appeal to Shay and Rax for assistance concealing their presence on the Balmera.

There's genuine contempt in Shiro's voice when he asks Sendak, "What do you want?", prior to his torture at Sendak's hands.

Sendak delivers a stomach-churning gloating little speech after torturing Shiro via electric shock.

And, Rolo refers to Sendak as a, "real nasty bugger", a term that has an exceptionally crude colloquial meaning.

Now, maybe I'm a cynical weirdo who is reading far too deeply into this, and connecting dots that aren't there. But...

Shiro bears a much stronger resemblance to Berserk's Guts than the Takashi Shirogane from the original Go Lion! that he's named after. Guts is a famous survivor of childhood sexual abuse, having been sold by his adoptive father and purchased for use as a sex slave by an ugly hulking pederast.

There were obvious Neon Genesis Evangelion fans working on this show, and Rei Ayanami, the character that Shiro's story seems to reference with the sheer excess of clones created using his DNA, is also a victim of sexual abuse.

(There's even, arguably, influence taken from The Legend of the Blue Wolves, a relatively obscure yaoi OVA largely set at a military facility which trains soldiers and pilots for combat missions in deep space. It features an extended scene with a virtual flight simulator, and one of the two male leads is-- wouldn't you know it? Raped by an ugly hulking monster.)

Correlation does not imply causation, and perhaps the similarities are entirely superficial, and we're not meant to think too hard about them.

Yet, with the amount of scrutiny that a series as utterly wholesome and innocuous as Bluey is constantly under, I cannot buy for a minute that a series Netflix gave a TV Y7 rating to didn't undergo some level of screening to ensure that its content was appropriate for the intended child audience. Someone had to have asked the staff if bugger was the term they meant to use, aware of the disturbing, far less than child-friendly implications, and was met with a resounding confirmation.

Beyond that, extended proximity to even an imprisoned and inanimate Sendak sends Shiro spiraling into a psychological break down.

Shiro's intensely traumatic experiences in captivity, which his brain seems to have largely repressed in order to protect him ("It's all a blur.") would, by themselves, be enough to convince him that he's been broken and reshaped into something monstrous. His bodily autonomy was, unquestionably, brutally violated, and his innately altruistic, self-sacrificing nature was violently challenged when he was forced to kill or be killed for his captors' entertainment. His right arm was taken from him and replaced with a weapon, and he has the blood of who knows just how many innocents on his hands. He was, indeed, broken down in an attempt to reform him into the Galra Empire's "greatest weapon", and likely very much wars with himself over what he had to do to ensure his own survival, believing himself to be a monster.

What really stands out to me, though, is that this intense, primal terror and the accompanying feelings of "brokenness" and "monstrousness" only surface around Sendak. Despite also being associated with and direct causes of his trauma, neither Haggar nor Zarkon rattle Shiro to his core the way Sendak does.

Neither of them are insistent on drilling into Shiro's head how "broken" he supposedly is, as Sendak is shown doing over and over again. Including taunting Shiro over the non-consensual modifications to his body.

Harboring a deep sense of shame, and viewing themselves as something dirty, ugly, disgusting, broken, or even monstrous is an experience common among survivors of sexual abuse.

Having Shiro's physical condition repeatedly mirror his personal tormentor's would be sick and twisted enough.

Adding the context of rape or sexual abuse to Shiro's torment makes the creative decision to intentionally model his arm after his abuser's outright sadistic.

No one deserves to have a constant physical reminder of their abuser and rapist permanently attached to their person. And, attempting to paint Shiro as a "heroic mirror" to Sendak fails entirely when Shiro doesn't so much as get to best Sendak in combat once.

All of the points you've raised about the function and structure of prosthetics are amazing, informative, and highly appreciated. (The comment about Shiro's abominable floating arm looking like it wouldn't be able to support the weight of a grocery bag makes me laugh.) Sadly, there's a faction of the fanbase who are all too quick to fetishize that arm, like everything else surface-level about Shiro. I've seen a number of fics where its ability to be propelled a great distance with a single thought is used to pleasure a partner while Shiro, himself, is in a different room, where the arm is equipped with a vibrating function for use as a sex toy, and, of course, where the thickness of its fingers is sexualized for... the same reason the bulge in the crotch of Shiro's pants is.

(I beg this fandom to stop reducing this man to a seme stereotype because of his physical build and height. Nothing in his personality suggests that he would be anything even approximating that cursed archetype. Let him be a pillow princess, for God's sake, like he deserves.)

This reply took me forever, and I am sincerely sorry about that. I hope you find something worthwhile in this haphazard collection of thoughts.

And, "Sendick" is how I'm going to be mentally referring to that creep from now on.

#Correspondence.#sockdooe #Takashi Shirogane #Shiro #You're nothingness but shining and everywhere at once.#Sendak #Voltron: Legendary Defender #Meta.#VLD Meta.#All I want is to fly with queue.#I want to apologize again for this response taking me so long to get out.#The topic of Shiro and Sendak and the VLD showrunners' attempts to keep turning Shiro into some sort of heroic 'mirror' of him disgusts and #infuriates me.#It brings up a lot of thoughts and I wanted to do something with them.#I hope you don't mind and I hope this analysis wasn't too upsetting for anyone.#The last thing I want to do is upset someone. :(

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